Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández
Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández

Overview of this book

<p>Both the amateur and the professional roboticist who has ever tried their hand at robotics programming will have faced with the cumbersome task of starting from scratch, usually reinventing the wheel. ROS comes with a great number of already working functionalities, and this book takes you from the first steps to the most elaborate designs possible within this software framework.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" is full of practical examples that will help you to understand the framework from the very beginning. Build your own robot applications in a simulated environment and share your knowledge with the large community supporting ROS.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" starts with the basic concepts and usage of ROS in a very straightforward and practical manner. It is a painless introduction to the fascinating world of robotics, covering sensor integration, modeling, simulation, computer vision, and navigation algorithms, among other topics.</p> <p>After the first two chapters, concepts like topics, messages, and nodes will become daily bread. Make your robot see with HD cameras, or navigate avoiding obstacles with range sensors. Furthermore, thanks to the contributions of the vast ROS community, your robot will be able to navigate autonomously, and even recognize and interact with you, in a matter of minutes.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" will give you all the background you need to know in order to start in the fascinating world of robotics and program your own robot. Simply, you put the limit!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

rqt plugins versus rx applications


Since ROS Fuerte, the rx applications or tools are deprecated and we should instead use the rqt nodes. They are basically the same, only with a few of them incorporated with small updates, bug fixes, and new features. Also, they can be loaded as plugins into a single window/application, which is rqt_gui. We show the equivalent for the tools shown in this chapter in the following list:

  • rxconsole is replaced by rosrun rqt_console rqt_console

  • rxgraph is replaced by rosrun rqt_graph rqt_graph

  • rxplot is replaced by rosrun rqt_plot rqt_plot

  • rxbag is replaced by rosrun rqt_bag rqt_bag

Furthermore, being plugins that can also be run standalone, there exist more tools, such as a shell, a topic publisher, and a message type viewer. Even rviz has a plugin named rqt_rviz that can be integrated in the new rqt_gui interface; all this is fully integrated in ROS Groovy and Hydro where rx tools are deprecated but still in the bundle. The same happens for ROS Fuerte,...